Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 16 May 2003, 5:59 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Monday 12/05/2003
As I'm at the Citrix iForum in Edinburgh later this week, I took myself up to that fair city for the weekend. This involved drinking heavily with pagans one evening, and going to the launch of a book of poetry the next -- which ended up at a disco in the Bathgate British Legion. Bathgate is a post-industrial working-class Scottish town, and isn't shy about having fun. Perhaps fortunately, the predicted swilling contest between the publishers and some booksellers didn't kick off and I escaped with my liver. I also ignored the suggestion that I introduce myself to everyone with "Hello, I'm Rupert. Didn't Thatcher do wonderful things for your country!". But the poetry was very good: "Sex, Death and Football", and plenty of it. We end with cheesy 70s tunes on the dancefloor under a benign picture of HM the Q -- the same one that the Sex Pistols so rudely adorned. It felt like a Channel 4 movie.
Monday itself passes quietly. I'm holed up in a Tollcross tenement flat, virtually private networked to London HQ via broadband, writing about technology while the rain lashes down on Home Street outside. My music collection is shared from the London flat over broadband too -- the days of lugging piles of CDs up on the train have long since gone -- and I can also do the Stern Father bit, allowing the offspring limited access to the Internet by remotely fiddling with the router without letting him completely mess up his revision schedule.
At least, that's the plan. There are ways around the blocks I've put in place, but as this severe regime was created as a result of his execrable result in a computing project I console myself with the idea that if he does bypass it, he'll at least have done some useful learning.
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